DoubleDutch Checks In Business Activities

Foursquare-like service extends HYVE social mobile platform to sales and field service staff and promotes checking in on business, not just from locations.

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DoubleDutch checked in at Enterprise 2.0, a UBM Tech Web event, in Boston Tuesday with a suite of location-aware apps for the enterprise.

DoubleDutch offers a sort of enterprise equivalent to Foursquare, in which users check in to a business activity as well as a location. To its basic framework for building and integrating mobile applications, DoubleDutch is adding a suite of applications for functions like sales and field service. Early customers include Cisco, Amdocs, Adobe, the TED conferences, and HP, but also a Vivo Pools, a Southern California pool service company.

The DoubeDutch HYVE platform expands on the check-in concept by prompting users to pick from a list of defined projects, customers, or business processes connected with their visit to a location. For example, a Vivo employee would check in differently for a sales call, as opposed to a weekly pool service visit.

"We think products like Jive and Yammer have it partly right," DoubleDutch CEO Lawrence Coburn said in an interview prior to the conference, but enterprise collaboration can be made more effective if the "free-form text box" of a standard status message is replace by a "structured check-in."

Cisco has been using DoubleDutch to encourage event check-ins at specific booths or sessions at its user conferences, or other conferences Cisco participates in. Enterprise 2.0 attendees can try the Cisco DoubleDutch app promoting its activities at the conference. DoubleDutch also published an Enterprise 2.0 iPhone app showcasing its new features.

Elizabeth Houston, the social media manager for Cisco's global events group, said DoubleDutch gives her away of encouraging peer-to-peer connections between attendees and an opportunity to provide incentives for participation in specific activities. The result is "almost like a dynamic agenda" for a conference, letting people see the popularity of different sessions, she said.

Andrew Warden, Cisco's head of strategy for emerging markets, said he heard about DoubleDutch from Houston and decided to adopt it "to provide a whole new view of what's happening in the field." With employees scattered across 18 time zones and 139 countries, keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging, he said. Just by letting employees see what customers their colleagues are checking in with, DoubleDutch has helped spark new collaborations, Warden said. "Just today, I saw somebody from Saudi Arabia connecting with someone from Brazil, and it all started with a 'like.'"

In the second phase of the implementation, Cisco plans to integrate with Cisco Quad, the company's own enterprise social media platform, so DoubleDutch check-ins will be shared with Quad users, Warden said.

The DoubleDutch apps announced Tuesday include HYVE Knowledge for project management teams; HYVE Field for field service and delivery workers; HYVE Sales for sales teams; HYVE CSR for corporate social responsibility (employee check-ins from their volunteer activities; HYVE Onboarding for human resources organizations checking in with new employees; HYVE Engage for brand and media promotions; and HYVE Events for event producers.

HYVE apps can be purchased together or separately, and accessed through the secure DoubleDutch cloud. Enterprises wanting to deploy behind the corporate firewall can also sign up for on-premises, enterprise subscription licensing. Mobile platform support includes iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, and HTML5. DoubleDutch provides an application programming interface for integration with other enterprise applications.

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